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Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Product Management Commandments

To make products users love, its a journey with many distractions, deviations, pivots, iterations and often times surprises. Its fruitful to keep a set of commandments close to your heart/mind/desk, as an ever guiding lamp-post, keeping you on the righteous path of product success.

So, here we go and share the practices we like to stick to. Would love to have your thoughts.

12 Product Management Commandments at CommonFloor

Look for the unmet need. When talking to users and customers, always be in a fierce desire to capture that unmet need - amid all the suggestions, feature requests and problems you might be listening to.

Put your best brains (the engineers, developers) closer to users. This can drive through-the-roof innovation.

You are not the user. Meet a new user every week and let her use your existing product, prototype and take observations.

Create life like user personas after meeting/studying real users. Understand these personas so well that you could very likely predict your user's action when he/she misses an airport bus and has no cash left for booking a cab.

Be absolutely clear and thorough with the "One Minute Product Value Proposition", which you validate each time you meet users.

Be focused on getting the "Right Product" and let the engineers handle how to get the product right.

Don't just get stuff done. Delight the user!

New features are not the answer to existing problems. Observe, Analyse and Iterate to get existing things right.

"Remove a feature to add a feature" - Deep, Linkedin.com

Fail faster. Use quick prototypes (Paper sketch, mockups) to know whats not working and what might.

Don't ever confuse product completion/launch as the success of product. Strive for creating a rapidly growing community of inspired, enthusiastic and loyal customers.